Cosmic Fortune

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Cosmic Fortune is a progressive slot game designed by NetEntertainment. I personally favor NetEnt slots over almost any other game designer, besides some titles released recently by BetSoft and a few of Microgaming’s licensed titles.

Cosmic Fortune has a difficult theme to describe. Essentially, it’s a mock-up of the old Space Invaders video game era, a time of alien monster movies and cheesy effects. The symbols are about what you’d expect – lots of alien faces, planets, rockets, and space-themed images.

Released in November of 2014 (the same day NetEnt retired eight older games), this was the first jackpot video title produced by the game, and it’s a doozy. The game is advertised as having five total jackpots. Obviously, the cosmic traveling theme isn’t what draws players to NetEnt’s new game – it’s the huge prizes available. Before I get ahead of myself, I want to go over some basics about the game.

Cosmic Fortune Slot

Available Stakes

The game uses fifteen paylines to determine winnings. Winning combos are formed by matching symbols from left to right across the screen on an active payline. The game has five reels of symbols.

One unique feature of Cosmic Fortune is the fact that players can’t choose the number of lines to wager on – all fifteen lines are activated on every spin. But, players can choose how many bets-per-payline to place (between 1 and 10), so that the total range of available coins wagers is between fifteen and 150.

Now we can work out the available stakes. Coin sizes for Cosmic Fortune are as follows: $0.02, $0.05, $0.15, $0.20, and $0.50. That makes for a range of available bets-per-spin between $0.30 and $75. That’s a pretty low range of available bets, especially for a NetEnt slot, but there’s a good reason for that – multiple bonuses, jackpots, and progressive prizes are available. More on that later.

Payout Percentage

According to this NetEnt fan site, the payout percentage on this title is 96.9%. I don’t know where the author got the information, since I had a devil of a time finding that detail on the NetEnt website. It’s not unusual for designers to not want to divulge their theoretical percentage, so this is probably an educated guess.

Jackpots

The top fixed jackpot is 1,500 coins, followed by 1,000 coins, and on down. These are won by forming combos of similar cosmic game symbols.

It’s important to point out that those fixed jackpots aren’t what Cosmic Fortune players are shooting for. This game includes something called the Avalanche Feature, several substituting wild symbols, and a Free Fall bonus game. These are all essentially Pachinko-style games, in which players attempt to use skill to guide marbles that “fall” from the top of the screen into cups, which rewards the player with free coins.

Remember those five jackpots from above? Three of them are progressive. They’re called the Midi, Major, and Mega Jackpots, respectively. These prizes are drawn from percentages of wagers made by players from across the game’s network. These are ever-increasing prizes triggered by very specific events.

When I last played the game, the Midi was worth around $6,000. The Major jackpot, technically the “average” jackpot, was worth around $20,000, and the Mega top-prize was hovering just over the $150,000 mark. Obviously, these prizes grow and shrink regularly, so they may be different when you visit.

Mobile Version

There is currently no mobile version of this NetEnt title.

Overall

I’m a huge fan of NetEnt; there’s no denying that. I wasn’t as impressed with this title as with some of their other recent video offerings. For starters, the symbols and fixed payouts are a little weak. I felt like I was forced into playing for bonuses and progressives. I also found the gameplay a little more repetitive than with other NetEnt themes.

Still, the progressives and even some of the fixed prizes are worth chasing, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The design is exquisite, as I’ve come to expect from NetEnt, and wagers are available on-the-cheap, for all you penny slot fans.